

CHARACTER AND ATTAINMENTS. 331 



knowledge which he had happily acquired of the theory 

 of music. He carried out also to a great extent the tal- 

 ent of executing it ; and I believe it is certain that of all 

 known instruments, even including the Scottish bagpipe, 

 only one or two could be named on which he could not 

 play. His taste for painting developed itself during a 

 visit which he paid to Germany. There the magnificent 

 collection of Dresden absorbed his attention entirely ; for 

 he aspired not solely to the easy credit of connecting 

 together, without mistake, the name of such or such an 

 artist with such or such a painting ; the defects and the 

 characteristic qualities of the greatest masters, their fre- 

 quent changes of manner, the material objects which 

 they introduced into their works, the modifications which 

 those objects and the colours underwent in progress of 

 time, among other points, occupied him in succession. 

 Young, in one word, studied painting in Saxony, as he 

 had before studied languages in his own country, and as 

 he afterwards studied the sciences. Every thing, in fact, 

 was a subject of meditation and research. The univer- 

 sity contemporaries of the illustrious physicist recalled a 

 laughable instance of this trait of his mind. They re- 

 lated that entering his room one day, when for the first 

 time he had taken a lesson in dancing the minuet, at 

 Edinburgh, they found him occupied in tracing out 

 minutely with the rule and compasses, the route gone 

 through by the two dancers, and the different improve- 

 ments of which these figures seemed to him susceptible. 



Young borrowed with happy effect, from the sect of 

 the Friends, to which he then belonged, the opinion that 

 the intellectual faculties of children differ originally from 

 each other much less than is commonly supposed. " Any 

 man can do what any other man has done," became his 



